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<title>UnicodeError: decoding error, invalid data</title>
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<h1><a href="/"><span id="feed"><span id="f">F</span><span id="e1">E</span><span id="e2">E</span></span><span id="d">D</span> Validator</a></h1>
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<h2>Message</h2>
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<p>UnicodeError: decoding error, invalid data</p>
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<h2>Explanation</h2>

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<p>Your feed contains an invalid character.</p>
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<h2>Solution</h2>
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<p>A common cause of this error is having a high-bit character (such as a curly quote or curly apostrophe) in your RSS feed.  This can happen if you copy-and-paste a quote from another page that contains curly quotes.  For maximum compatibility with readers, you should remove the invalid character or use a numeric entity equivalent.</p>

<p>You can also try changing your character encoding to a more liberal encoding.  For example, if you have this at the top of your feed:</p>

<p><samp>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?&gt;</samp></p>

<p>Try changing it to this:</p>

<p><samp>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?&gt;</samp></p>

<p>This can be a difficult error to diagnose, because the validator can not give you the exact location of the error.  (This is due to a limitation of our parsing library; sorry, we tried very hard to work around it!)  For example, if the validator says the error occurred at the end of a <code>description</code> element, the actual invalid character could be anywhere within the description.</p>
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<h2>Not clear?  Disagree?</h2>
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<p>Let us know on the <a href="http://feeds.archive.org/mailman/listinfo/feeds-archive-talk">feeds-archive-talk</a> discussion list!
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<p class="meta">This documentation page was last updated on June 26, 2003.</p>
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<address>Copyright &copy; 2002-3 <a href="http://diveintomark.org/">Mark Pilgrim</a> and <a href="http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/">Sam Ruby</a></address>
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